By BILL WHITE, SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, July 5, 2007

Free of the forced cleverness of such disappointments as "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and "Lucky Number Sleven," John Dahl's "You Kill Me" has more natural laughs than any half-dozen recent crime comedies.

Frank (Ben Kingsley) is a walking Polish joke. A hit man with a drinking problem, he passes out on the job, letting an important target get away. Banished by his uncle Roman (Philip Baker Hall) to San Francisco, Frank joins AA, gets a job in a mortuary and starts dating Laurel (Tea Leoni), who doesn't mind him being a murderer and a drunk, so long as he isn't gay. Little by little, he cleans up his act so he can return to his home in Buffalo, N.Y., and the one thing he does best: killing people.

Kingsley, stiffly stoic as the assassin in exile, crosses the idiot savant of Peter Sellers' Chance the Gardener from "Being There" with the cold skill of Jean Reno's "Leon -- The Professional." As Laurel, Leoni not only plays the "straight woman in gay San Francisco" way outside the stereotype, but makes it believable that she would fall for a loser like Frank.

As Dave, the real estate agent who sets Frank up with an apartment and a job, Bill Pullman looks and acts as if he just broke out of a David Lynch movie. Luke Wilson plays Tom, Frank's AA sponsor, as a gay man without any semblance of being gay, which is funnier than it sounds.

The script is pared to the bone, and Dahl fills each scene with detail. One of his most successful comic devices is the use of a third, non-involved character to unnerve a scene. When Frank confesses to Tom, who works as a toll collector, that he is a hit man, there is a hilarious bit with a driver waiting for his change. Dahl is also a master at stifled reaction shots. Half of the fun is watching these preposterous people pretend not to react to each other.

Although "You Kill Me" has about as much depth as a sheet of ice, it is a deviously delightful entertainment that is a return to form for director Dahl, who has not, until now, lived up to the promise of his early films like "The Last Seduction" and "Red Rock West."